About EON

EON is building the highest-throughput point-to-point data transport network ever deployed in space. Using free-space laser links in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), we move petabytes of data between any two points on Earth as an alternative to subsea or terrestrial fiber. EON recently closed a $10.75M seed financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst in their first-ever co-led space deal. EON is building out of its R&D center in Culver City.

Today, approximately 95% of the global internet travels through a few hundred subsea fiber-optic cables, infrastructure designed in the early 2000s that has gone largely unchanged. Demand for new fiber has never been higher, but laying it is extraordinarily difficult: permits, ocean geology, and geopolitical boundaries make every new cable a years-long, billion-dollar undertaking. That bottleneck is a liability with cables at constant risk of being cut, whether by accident or adversarial action, and no amount of ground-based investment can fully solve it.

The Role

Our ground terminal needs gimbals, coarse-steering mechanisms, and structures that point a telescope at a moving satellite and survive years in the field, designed from the start for production and repeatable assembly. We are seeking a mechanical engineer to own the terminal's mechanisms and structures, from the demonstrator's first build through designs that can be manufactured for every ground station. You'll own the terminal-scale mechanisms and structures, partnering with the optomechanical seats whose sub-micron optical mounts ride on your hardware, and with the PAT, GNC, and Thermal seats on the budgets that flow through it.

Responsibilities

Design the terminal's gimbal and coarse-steering mechanisms: bearings, drives, encoders, and the stiffness and backlash budgets the PAT loop points through

Design the terminal structures: telescope support, enclosures, and the load paths that hold optical alignment through wind, thermal, and handling loads

Own structural analysis for stiffness, modal behavior, and survival loads, and correlate models to test

Define mechanism requirements with the PAT and GNC seats (slew rates, pointing stiffness, jitter contributions) and carry them into hardware

Work with the Thermal seat on the structural-thermal behavior that drives pointing and alignment stability

Drive design-for-manufacturability and repeatable assembly, so the demonstrator terminal becomes a build recipe rather than a one-off

Select and manage suppliers and machine shops for structures and mechanism components, from prototype through production

Support terminal integration and field deployment, owning mechanical issues from bench to site

Qualifications

Bachelor's or advanced degree in mechanical engineering or a related discipline

Mechanism design depth: gimbals, rotation stages, actuators, bearings, and drive trains

Structural design and analysis experience, with proficiency in FEA (ANSYS Mechanical or equivalent)

Proficiency in professional 3D CAD (NX, SolidWorks, Creo, or equivalent), including toleranced drawings for fabrication

Hands-on prototyping, assembly, and test experience

Comfort moving fast and making sound calls without complete data

Preferred Experience

Precision pointing mechanisms: telescope mounts, antenna gimbals, or tracking pedestals

Designing for outdoor or field-deployed hardware: sealing, corrosion, and wind and seismic loads

Motion-control adjacency: encoders, servo drives, and mechanism-level tuning alongside controls engineers

Design-for-manufacturability and design-for-assembly for low-rate production

Optomechanical adjacency: kinematic mounts, athermalization, or structures that hold optical alignment

Environmental test (vibration, shock, thermal cycling) for mechanisms and structures

Materials selection for stiffness, weight, and thermal stability trades

A note on level and background: We hire this role at all levels, from Associate through Senior and Principal Mechanical Engineer, and calibrate title, scope, and compensation to your experience. If this list doesn't perfectly match your background still reach out. We are always looking for exceptional people from many disciplines.